Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

vimm writes "Senator Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) has started an inquiry on the rising prices of text messaging (up 100% since 2005) that has occurred almost in sync with the consolidation of 6 major carriers down to 4. In a letter sent to Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint Nextel, and T-Mobile, Kohl said the increase 'does not appear to be justified by rising costs in delivering text messages.'"

Keep up his line of questioning and you may find your re-election campaign underfunded. And by pure coincidence, everyone in your voting district may receive text messages encouraging them to vote for your opponent.

Yes Mr. Senator, we live by mutually agreeable terms. You have a nice seat in the senate, and it would be a shame if anything were to happen to it.

However, the carriers don't own the frequencies they use, they use them in the public interest because we let them.
If they are not serving the public interest their licenses can be revoked.
It couldn't happen to nicer guys!

... the post office is charging $0.42 per text message, and it takes days to get there!

Yes, but a post office text message can contain about 840 Verizon text messages and a memory card with 16 GB of data. Trying to send that over a cell phone would take half a week of data transfer and cost you three arms and a leg!

Senator Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) has started an inquiry on the rising prices of text messaging (up 100% since 2005) that has occurred almost in sync with the consolidation of 6 major carriers down to 4.

Well, it could be that the competition was driving prices down to a lower level and then after the two consolidated, this (money losing) price reduction natural re-adjusted back up.

Another reason could just be that it's just as easy to sell plans at 10 cents a txt as it is to sell them at 5 cents a txt. We simply don't realize the cost adds up as consumers.

It could also be that people use text messages about twice as much now as they did in 2005 and the hardware just can't take it, so they adjust the price to reduce usage.

I think we've discussed this absurd price before [slashdot.org]. I am quite naive about the whole electrical engineering side to this but well versed in the software of it. If it costs nearly nothing for me to talk for a minute, why couldn't they wrap the txt into a digital signal identical to what our vocal signal is wrapped up in and just let the receiving unit decode it as a special text message across the same audio range (like the old phone modems)?

I used to work for one of the large telecommunications companies. 161 bytes plus a little bit of HTTP header overhead is nothing. Practically everything performed on today's cellphones is completed via HTTP commands - most are clear-text. Usually, the only thing NOT encrypted is the NAI of user of the phone.

It just doesn't ring true to me that text messages are eating up their bandwidth even if the scale of their customer base is increased with the next purchase of the next cell-co.

Yeah, I find it hard to believe that the 11GB I burn through for $70 on my HSDPA card equates to the 112KB the same $70 would purchase for SMS. That same 11GB would thus cost me $7.3 million per month if billed as SMS.

Perhaps someone with more protocol and hardware knowledge than me can explain how that's remotely reasonable.

SMS messages are sent over a control channel, not the voice channel, which is pricier, more controlled and critical to the health of the network.

RF communications for a mobile telephone network are quite different from the TCP/IP networks you are familiar with. The UDP/TCP abstractions shown to applications running on top of the mobile, to make life easier to developers, are just the tip of the iceberg.

First read about the layers in a CDMA/EVDO/GSM/UMTS network and the components that handle them, and then

While you are correct, they all do use HTTP for MMS messages. Unfortunately, they charge seperately for MMS than data (which costs less. Just make SMS and MMS cost data! Even rounding up the 161 bytes to a kilobyte at $0.05/kb would be cheaper than text messages are now. MMS would go up in price (max for MMS is ~400kb) but that's what data plans are for.)

I don't know where you get the idea that SMS has anywhere near 0% error rate. As best as I can tell, they get sent on the lowest priority possible, are sometimes delayed for minutes or hours, and occasionally never make it at all.

None of the carriers I've been with guarantee the delivery of text messages (3 out of the 4 main ones).

Someone higher up asked about operational costs involved in sending text messages. Consider the amount of data that makes it to your phone to make it ring (Incoming call) when you add in Caller ID data. Now that costs you nothing if you don't answer. Now compare it to the slight difference in data to a SMS (text message) which now cost.20 every time you receive one.

For GSM, it takes less time to send a regular text message than set up a call and wait for the other side to ring. In order to do both, the phone first requests a channel from the base station. It is then assigned a signalling channel on which the phone and the base station negotiate what's going to happen next. For a text, its simply transmitted as a set of messages on the signalling channel and then then phone leaves the channel. For a call, the mobile exchanges messages with the base station as to wh

Yeah, I never really said they were. Don't be confused, I wasn't rushing to the defense of the cell phone companies. I've danced the dance of customer support with both AT&T/Singular and Verizon. As far as I'm concerned they can both collapse and I would happily switch to the next in line.

Doesn't stop me from speculating on what might have actually caused this.

I'm glad the senator is asking questions, hell senators should be asking companies questions left and right. It's not like they're

Unfortunately, I'm sure we're all aware this is just a senator trying to make it look like he's rattling a few cages

Actually, afaic, Herb Kohl is one of the few good guys left in Congress. And fwiw, since he's got his own millions of bucks from the Kohl's department store chain, he doesn't need money from anybody. Got his own stash, thank you very much. So while I wouldn't deny that he's a publicity whore (duh! he's a politician!) I would say that it's a safe bet that, oddly enough, he's pushing this in part simply because he's disgusted with the telecom companies.

- on public transport, if you don't want to annoy anyone else- to send a message to someone who's probably driving, they can pick it up later- to send a non-urgent message (e.g. at night, it will be noticed in the morning)- when signal is intermittant (e.g. moving vehicle) a text has a better chance of getting through- when you need to be discreet- notifications (e.g. "only £20 left in your bank account", or "phone bill overdue")- information (e.g. you book some train/plane tickets and the times are texted to you)- when you can't hear (nightclub, concert, noisy subway, party)- when you can't talk (school, lecture, office)

If the messages I sent started costing the other person money I might think twice about them though.

Because that "private company" is using "public property" (airwaves) under "government license" to do said business and as such are no less a government-created oligopoly than landline telcos and cable companies.

Holy crap, just imagine if you had to pay for every comment on Slashdot, even the anonymous cowards that don't say anything useful, much like the advertisements I get about four times a week now because some assholes thought it would be +1 Funny and +1 Informative to randomly stick my cell phone number into all those stupid sites.

I can't speak for the US, but here we have premium numbers for texting (usually they'll pay a little extra to get a 4 digit number). What it boils down to is that each SMS they receive (which is usually at 5-10 times the price of a normal SMS), they get approximatly 40% of the revenue and the carrier gets approximatly 60%. I say approximatly here because there are various plans, rates which are far too complex and boring to explain here.

The "Text us DURR to receive a new horoscope/ringtone/anal probe every hour" services, have the ability to send out SMS'es that cost money to the person receiving them. Once the person signed up for the service, they're free to start sending SMS'es whenever they see fit. There have been various customers who've received phonebills reaching into the 5000€ range.

The problem is that the whole thing was completely unregulated, and that there was no legal requirement for these companies to have a maximum of charges per day per customer. When that got regulated (in a very half-assed way) it wasn't the end of all the trouble they'd started. SMS Dating services suddenly got very popular, which required the client to SMS the "person" he was talking to, and which was basicly an OK for the company to start sending him a couple of SMS'es.

To cut this long story short and get to the interesting part, these kinds of companies were really goldmines when the whole SMS thing started picking up pace. The equipment is relatively cheap (you can buy a GSM modem for nickles and dimes), the programming for a system like that is DEAD easy (if you know Hayes commands and perl/python/whatever you can have a service like that up and running in a matter of hours).

The contract with the telephone company is very easy to obtain. All you need to do is provide some information about your company, and negotiate about how much traffic you'll be causing and receiving. As the amount of traffic goes up, the profits get higher and you get better rates.

These days it's much cheaper to have a large third party provide the service for you. They'll give you something like a rudimentary webservice where you can submit SMS'es to, they take a piece of the cake, the operator takes a piece of the cake, but you can still make money with the entire thing. Third parties are a lot easier to negotiate good deals with because they generate a lot of SMS traffic and get rates from the operator you'll never be able to get.

Finally, to answer your question: cell phone companies aren't sponsoring other companies to drive up usage. The whole thing was and probably still is a real goldmine. There's enormous amounts of people who will subscribe to these services, and they usually don't learn after they've received their first ridiculous phonebill.

I worked together with a company that provided such services at some point for a project that was a lot more innocent than what these guys usually did. They were raking in money back then, and since they still exist my guess is that they're still raking in money right now.

If I recall correctly there used to be a scam with premium telephone numbers on landlines waaaaaaay back when. The idea is basicly that you call a regular looking number, but in fact the number you're dialing has a special tariff. The company would then keep you on hold, occupied or stall you as long as possible from hanging up. Eventually the situation got so bad that the operators were forced to block all premium numbers which weren't explicitly marked with a special prefix, unless the customer requested access to that phone number by calling his operator and enabling that number. The unprefixed premium number business then sank into a slump and was effectively killed. This was of course borderline scamming, but the telcos didn't care because they again were making enormous amounts of money. Prefixed premium numbers are still making a small fortune these days with televised games and quizzes, call-in numbers for radio stations, etc etc. A fool and his money...

I've never met bigger sharks than telco people. From what I gather the situation has somewhat improved, but not much.

Another interesting question: my phone service (through Verizon) has free after-hours calling, but I pay the same rate for text messages and other data services regardless of time of day. Surely if the data from my phone call is cheaper to transmit at 10pm, then the data from my SMS message is too?

Why do intelligent people persist in applying rationality to these questions? Is it purely a strategy to re-frame the public debate in vain hopes of changing the situation?

Text messages are either marked-up several thousand percent or infinitely, depending on your analysis. What is the point of expecting the consumer price of texts to respond at all to real costs, when the provider cost varies by at most thousands of a cent?

The problem with cellular competition in the US isn't collusion or some other nonsense, it is that people are happy to participate in a model where they are always paying (at a pre-negotiated rate) for more than they are using.

If people weren't happy to shovel $1200 a year to the phone companies for unlimited use, the price would be a lot more reflective of what it costs to provide.

Do you really think people are happy with overpaying? Or is it that they have no choice?

I've been avoiding owning a cell phone for years because of the costs and the pricing models. However, it's becoming more and more inconvenient not to have one.

There are no good options. If I get a pay-as-you-go phone, the minutes cost much more than a monthly plan if I use the phone often. If I get a monthly plan, I am forced to guess how many minutes I will use. If I choose a plan with a lower number of minutes and go over, those extra minutes are charged at a vastly higher rate. It's all very unfriendly and designed to extract as much money as possible from the customer.

If a provider would come along and offer a more fair plan, I think people would flock to it. If there was genuine competition in this market, providers would be forced to offer better plans in order to compete. There may not be collusion in the "smoky back room" sense, but the reality is that nothing changes because there is no market force driving these companies to change. They are happy to sit around and keep making money at everyone's expense.

If the nature of the cellular marketplace is that the normal laws of competition do not apply, that is the point at which the government needs to step in. Redefine the market so that the companies must compete. Allow people to switch providers easily and take their phones with them. Regulate pricing for services like texting which cost next to nothing to provide. I don't know the best answer, but it is high time that something be done.

While the big boys are charging $100 or more for their unlimited calling plans, there are a couple smaller providers that offer unlimited calling and texting and everything else for less than $50 (even down to $30 if you just want unlimited talk). And more importantly, there are no contracts involved. Hell, here (in Vegas) they're even offering the first month or two free (depending on which provider).

It took a while, but the general populace is finally getting fed up with the nickel-and-diming that the big wireless companies are so fond of, and the small providers out there selling unlimited services at a reasonable price are growing by leaps and bounds because of it.

Herb, we told you the check was in the mail, why can't you be more patient? I have to warn you if you continue on this track future checks may be even slower to arrive. I'm sure you'll start to see things our way very soon.

Kohl said he is particularly concerned that all four of the companies appear to have adopted identical price increases at nearly the same time. "This conduct is hardly consistent with the vigorous price competition we hope to see in a competitive marketplace," he wrote.

Yeah, that sucks. Text messaging should be dirt cheap. Yeah, they're making an enormous profit off it.But text messaging is voluntary. You can stop any time you want. They're clearly charging what the market will bear.Sure, it makes them look like scum when they're getting paid huge amounts for not doing very much... but c'mon, Senator Kohl, that's the American Dream! If y'all don't like it, get rid of your cellphones and use email.

Usually it's conservatives who argue for the free market to sort things out, and liberals want increased regulation.

Anyway, it would be good to let the free market sort this out. The fact that it hasn't implies that the cellular market is not free. Free markets work because of competition, the high prices of text messages indicate that there's no competition in that market. That's not a good thing, regardless of which side of the aisle you identify with.

Says who? There are four providers of text messages, and several other means of communicating data. Would you believe that for many people, the VERY SAME DEVICE that sends text messages for $0.10 can be used to send a one-minute voice communication for ZERO INCREMENTAL COST to the customer, but the customer chooses to pay the $0.10 anyway?

Not to mention the myriad of other ways people have to share information OTHER than text messages.

The high prices of text messages indicate that there's no competition in that market.

Except that YOU don't get to decide whether the price is high or not. The market does. And the *MARKET* has decided that the price of text messages is reasonable. People are willing to pay $0.10 to send a text message. What it COSTS to provide the message is irrelevant.

Did you know that people sell oil and gold for more than the cost to mine it? Did you know that that soft drink you pay $3.50 for at the movie theater costs the movie theater pennies worth of syrup and cold water?

Did you know that you can get a cell phone plan that lets you talk on your phone from nearly anywhere in the country and to anywhere in the country for *LESS* than it used to cost for a landline and long distance?

Did you know that many drugs sold for $10 or more a pill cost mere pennies to manufacture? All you have to do is invest a few billion in finding one that works.

And while the incremental cost of sending a text message may be $0, all you have to do to send them is invest a few hundred billion in a cell phone network....

At the end of the day, if people are willing to pay $0.10 a minute and $0.10 a message, then that's what people are willing to pay. Which one provides the better margins to the cellular company is irrelevant, as long as people are willing to pay the price charged and the company has enough revenue to stay in business.

It's not a free market because I can't purchase AT&Ts text messages if I'm a TMobile customer and vice versa. If your car could only buy gas from one company then you would see extravagantly priced gasoline.

"People are willing to pay $0.10 to send a text message. What it COSTS to provide the message is irrelevant."

The cost is not irrelevant. If consumers are willing to buy for $.1 and the providers are willing to sell for $.01, economics says the price should be between $.01 and $.1. But why should it be $.1 and not $.01? Why is it clamped at what the consumers are willing to pay and not what the providers are willing to sell for?

It is because the providers set the stage. They have control of the market. They operate together, not necessarily directly through collusion, but possibly indirectly through using the same marketing research companies, industry organizations, et cetera.

In a healthy market, the price floats somewhere between the minimum price the providers are willing to sell for and the maximum price the sellers are willing to buy for. There is a give-and-take. Prices may hit one end of the clamp or another from time to time due to natural fluctuations, but when it is grossly disproportionate to actual costs, then there is something wrong. The market is unhealthy and is being unfairly manipulated.

Are you joking or stupid? You obviously have no idea what a price co-ordinated economy is. The market doesn't work on giant companies telling you what you're going to pay based on what they think they can get because all competition is gone due to oligopoly.

Did you know that people sell oil and gold for more than the cost to mine it?

Did you now the Oil companies are watched like hawks for trust violations? and that a large part of oil prices are set by the largest cartel in the world? Hardly a free market.

Did you know that that soft drink you pay $3.50 for at the movie theater costs the movie theater pennies worth of syrup and cold water?

Sounds like vendor lock in, which last time I checked was considered a coercion of the free market.

Did you know that many drugs sold for $10 or more a pill cost mere pennies to manufacture? All you have to do is invest a few billion in finding one that works

NO, bad idiot, read some facts. drug companies spend more on ads then R&D, it's just they get the govt. to strong arm everyone through intellectual property laws to pay more, Complete failure of the free market.

In the competitive free-market advocated by Milton Friedman, not The oligopolistic-market advocated by the modern republicans, the consumer demand and the cost of supply set prices, not the whims of some giant company that has strong armed govt. support and stifled competition.

It's basic morals, universalize the maxim: if every company did the same you'd only have on company left after a while, it would be the one who controlled the food and you'd have to sell your life away for just enough food to survive. It happened in the past, it was called feudalism, and is basically what your view of business advocates at it's extreme.

Companies only believe in the free market when it suits them, so they don't deserve it. The only way to keep prices low is to intelligently regulate and keep the corporations small and relatively powerless so they don't have the resources to buy their way into the government's good graces.

Without stiff and proper rules keeping corporate interests separate from government interests, you always end up with corrupted governments relaxing regulations and robbing public resources for private profit, or as they like to call it, privatizing. Notice under the Bush administration that all of the deregulation and plundering of public property has resulted in a highly unstable economy. When you eliminate so many rules that the only thing stopping the resulting mega corporation from ripping people off are the inherent ethics guiding a company, you'll quickly be reminded that the only moral standard they answer to is the bottom line.

Issues that matter to people will always get raised during election time. The price of gas will drop dramatically pretty soon just before the election and there will not be any connection to world events. It happened times before and will happen again. Everyone knows Oil Industry == Republicans and the easiest way for them to gain favor is to relieve people with lower gasoline prices for a short while.

But these tactics aren't limited to the price of gasoline... we will see more issues like the price of texting or all sorts of other nonsense that people can rally behind. It is unfortunately a part of the game and typically, even though people get excited about the apparent intention to reign in some justice and sanity, almost nothing ever really happens... except, perhaps, additional contributions from the accused industry.

That's exactly what I just did last month with my new iPhone. I asked AT&T to completely cancel my texting service.

I can still be reached via email, and I can even text other people at no extra cost using various internet services, but I can no longer be reached via text.

I encourage you to do the same if you have unlimited internet on your phone. I understand that not everyone's phone can send and receive email very easily (or at all), but why not start making that push now?

When people ask me if I got their text I explain my stance on absurd texting charges (for both sending and receiving) and tell them I canceled my texting service. People have been surprisingly understanding and I haven't had any problems so far.

Of course, I'm substituting an expensive internet plan for a cheaper texting plan. But I feel that unlimited internet on a good cell phone is worth the price, whereas texting is not.

You're talking to a society of people that will spend $1.25 for a bottle of water out of a vending machine which is sitting right next to a water fountain.

I hate when people use this as some kind of statement of stupidity. Water from water fountains tastes gross, mainly because it is heavily chlorinated and chlorine has such a sharp, nasty taste to it. So if I'm not on the verge of dehydration and just want something cool and refreshing to enjoy I sure as hell am not going drink nasty tap water.

SMS prices are not based on what they cost to deliver they're based on what the market will bear. Downloading an mp3 over SMS would cost over 5 grand [mobilemessaging2.com].

I'm not sure there's so much collusion as a majority of people willing to pay insane prices for texting, and cell phones in general. I recently found a cell phone bill from about 10 years ago - it was $9.99 per line (times 2) plus tax (I got a local big-employer discount, the regular rate was $14.99 per line). It came with, I think 120 minutes, which is all I ever use anyway. My current Verizon bill is now easily $85/mo for two lines with a basic text package. Sure, there's been inflation, but there's also less competition.

I understand that in countries where the service providers are separated from the equipment providers the competition is fierce. I'm not sure but I'd guess that it's because people can jump from provider to provider on their non-crippled phones.

My employer pays huge text messaging bills, mostly because they view the 10 cents a text message costs to be a non-starter. Even with the average user sending 100-200 messages, that only tacks on $20 to the average cell phone bill.

And believe me, at my company, each phone is easily a $150/month bill.

When you're billing out engineers at $200/hour, another $20 on the monthly bill is nothing. I'd guess that the average high-volume cell user is typically not watching the nickels and dimes on the statement.

We respectfully take your concerns into consideration, and present you with this money basket. We hope that this free donation to your re-election campaign, brand new BMW, and lakehouse are enjoyed thoroughly by you! Thank you for ceasing your inquiry - err, we mean, thank you for invariably enjoying our gifts!

What is really amazing is that people seem to come out in droves to defend the carriers. I wrote an article on the ridiculously high cost of text messages some time ago (which was also featured here on/. as well as several major media outlets - yes, I'm tooting my own horn) and couldn't count the people who came out and said "DUH! They're charging what they are because people are willing to pay it!"

These are the kind of assholes who troll around the web looking for any discussion in which to insert their derogatory "I'm smarter than you - it's so obvious!" attitude while ignoring the issue at hand. No, prices are not justified by the markets willingness to pay them. Do you think it is justified that a friend of mine had to go $400,000 in debt because he got brain cancer while he didn't have insurance? His family was willing to pay it, so it must be a great deal, right? Do you think that higher and higher gas prices are justified even while the price of oil drops and oil companies post record profits quarter after quarter?

No, of course those things aren't justified. Just like it wouldn't be justified if all the food manufacturers suddenly decided to charge 10x more for food. It's anti competitive and it's illegal for a very good reason. Price fixing ruins the free market and ensures that consumers get the crappiest possible product for the greatest price. It ruins innovation and takes a huge dump on everyone in the market. Several historical examples show this, but I won't get into that here. Two seconds of critical thinking will get you to the same conclusion.

Text messaging is a 100 billion dollar industry in the U.S. That's bigger than all the movies, all the music, and all the video games in the entire world put together. The current cost of a single 140 byte text message is 40 cents (which is obfuscated by the fact that the sender AND the receiver are both paying 20 cents each). I can get a letter hand delivered to any doorstep in the U.S. for about the same price. The cost of a text message to the carrier is virtually ZERO. Yet somehow, they are saying that 40 cents is a fair price. I want to know why, and I'm glad someone in congress is doing something about it.

What I don't fscking like is that they don't charge for SENDING text messages, they charge for RECEIVING them. If you don't want to pay for individual text messages received, you have to pay $5 each month for unlimited texts. So you either pay them 50 or 60 cents a month for some spam texts that you never wanted, or you pay them $5. It's theft. Imagine if the postal service charged you to receive mail. Think of all the junk mail out there that people would send you for free. Fsck that. They should charge for sending texts. Receiving should be free.

The price of text messages is unreasonable. Proof can be found in the fact that during a disaster such as a hurricane the mobile companies urge people to use text messaging instead of voice communications. Either mobile companies are scalping people by suggesting the more expensive text messaging during times of emergency, or it is less expensive to maintain the text messaging network.

Like all asynchronous data, texts can be squished into idle network time. In a predominantly isochronous system (voice dominated) there has to be some spare capacity to keep the isochronous flow going. This space capacity can be used to transport text etc. Thus, the network cost of supporting text is zero, or damn close.

But the price they charge customers will depend on what customers are prepared to pay. Network operators charge more, per amount of data moved, for text than they do for voice (a single SMS uses less bandwidth than a second of voice, yet costs about 20x voice on most plans). Since it is waste, they can afford to discount heavily to bulk buyers (who don't mind their SPAM taking a bit longer to get there).

Thus, network operators love text: it converts their waste into something more valuable than their main product. How cool is that!

Email usually requires a data plan of some sort, which usually isn't free. Using ala cart SMS is usually cheaper than signing up for a data plan if you plan to send less than 25-30 messages a month. Plus SMS messages are received without user intervention or setup. Now some of us have push-email that allows us to receive email (or be notified of email) as soon as it hits our inbox, but I doubt the average joe shmoe has it. On the other hand, I'm sure he probably has an SMS equipped phone if it's been bought in the last 4-5 years.

Text doesn't even consume any voice bandwidth since it is sent over the control channel. It doesn't cost the telcos much if anything to support other than setting up various gateways. It's great since the control channel is always active for a phone anyway (whereas the voice has to be set up for incoming or outgoing calls).

The controls are pretty redundant, and their routing is not obvious from anywhere inside the passenger module. The odds of randomly hitting anything critical with a centimeter-wide slug from a handgun before other passengers with guns would take you out is astronomical. Especially if they just had a bowl of complementary derringers at the boarding ramp.

Which is why I'm sad to say we will probably always be dealing with Islamic terrorists

The odds of randomly hitting anything critical with a centimeter-wide slug from a handgun before other passengers with guns would take you out is astronomical. Especially if they just had a bowl of complementary derringers at the boarding ramp.

Oh great, then I'd have someone's kid shooting the back of my seat for the whole flight.

Or maybe a showy issue that most americans can identify with, will help non-technical americans realize how badly monopolies are robbing them? You know, and I know, that the cost of sending a text message is so incredibly small charging any amount of money beyond voice service is essentially highway robbery. But many people think it's new, and thus must be a huge complicated thing.

Yeah, text messages themselves are stupid secondary problems. But waking people up, and forcing them out of the idiocy of news tv talking heads, and forcing them into the cognitive dissonance caused when they realize businesses are hurting them because capitalism ISN'T working as designed... that helps a lot. Otherwise it sounds like a bunch of pompous academics in suits talkin fancy words and talkin smack about god and the president.

if we'd just established a national telecom network rather than give subsidies to the telecoms so that we can pay for the infrastructure they ream us for using, then this wouldn't be happening.

IT/communications infrastructure is just as important as roads and sewers these days. and there are much more efficient ways of managing our national communications network than the mess of private networks we have right now--which does not give us the benefits of consumer choice, yet still lacks any kind of centralized planning which a natural monopoly ought to have.

if all communications infrastructure could be nationalized, the first thing to do would be to:

convert/integrate cellular networks into municipal wi-fi

convert all TV/radio broadcast ranges into wi-fi/wi-max bands

establish a single unified, and open, cellular communication network that resides on top of the national wi-fi network

compare the progress & development made on the internet/web as an open public communication network with that of our nation's cellular networks. very little innovation or technological progress has been made in cellular technology because these proprietary networks are closed to outside developers. only a small number of handset makers are given permission to build devices for use on these private networks, and the telecoms' tight grip of these networks preclude the possibility of adopting new features.

and since the internet can handle the transmission of digital video, audio & text just fine, there's no point in having redundant communications networks that are dedicated to TV/radio/telecommunication--especially in the case of long distance calls and text messages where telecoms charge extortionate prices for something which costs close to nothing to accomplish through the public internet.

and if cellular networks were converted into municipal wi-fi coverage, not only would it provide ubiquitous wi-fi internet access for everyone, but we'd stop having to pay extortionate rates for cellular data plans. we would be converting a highly specialized network of limited usefulness to a much more generally useful network that can accomplish all of the same things and more.

what if it was modeled after academic/research institutions like Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, Los Alamos National Laboratories/DOE, CERN, etc.?

the belief that commercial competition is the only driving force for innovation is a myth. ARPANET was not born of commercial competition. ask Tim Berners-Lee if his vision of the World Wide Web was spurred by competition.

in any case, these are cultural problems. perhaps we _are_ becoming a world full of 'Thomas Edison's rather than 'Nikola Tesla's. if you build a society in which money & wealth are what makes the world turn, then that is what people will aspire towards. likewise, if you build a communications infrastructure which is operated by commercial corporations, run by businessmen & CEOs with MBAs rather than PhDs, then of course all technological progress will rest on the actions and decisions of people driven purely by financial motivations.

however, if you establish a communications infrastructure which operates like an academic/research institution, as is done with most cutting edge research/technology (ex. the LHC), then it'll be intellectually-driven individuals who rise to positions of power and push the technology forward.

that's the cost of having an unregulated corporate monopoly. and that wasn't a national telecom network. the Bell Telephone Company was an entirely privately-owned commercial enterprise which the government had no hand in running, and hence the public had no control over.

communications networks are natural monopolies. that's the most efficient way to run communications infrastructure. that's why it should have been nationalized instead of simply broken up into separate companies and remaining in the private sector--which are now re-consolidating whilst the industry continues to be de-regulated.

we can keep letting the pendulum swing back and forth between a regulated & fragmented and unregulated & consolidated corporate monopoly (depending on whether the republicans are in office), or we can nationalize our communications infrastructure once and for all and treat it as a true public resource/utility. then, instead of running our communications networks based on maximizing shareholder profits, we could run them based on maximizing efficiency and public good.

Or maybe a showy issue that most americans can identify with, will help non-technical americans realize how badly monopolies are robbing them? You know, and I know, that the cost of sending a text message is so incredibly small charging any amount of money beyond voice service is essentially highway robbery. But many people think it's new, and thus must be a huge complicated thing.

A couple of comments:

1) I'm not sure why people seem to believe the cost of producing a good should determine the selling price. Demand and the manufacturer's desire to maximize profit does that. Simply becaasue something can be produced cheaply does not mean it should be sold cheaply as well.

2) I would not call US cellphone industry a monopoly - Not only have prices dropped considerably we have a variety of providers and plans to chose from. For example, I can get unlimited text and calls for $38/month

Capitalism works just fine... text messaging is too expensive, so I don't use it.

There... capitalism at it's finest. If someone using text messaging is complaining it's too expensive, then maybe they should look at alternatives or STFU. THAT is what capitalism is all about.

Oh. So when I get a message telling me that Zoltan has prepared my fortune for me, or that my Perfect Crush is waiting for me, or I can find out my top five Perfect Lovers and I get dinged $0.10 apiece for receiving them, just exactly how is that "capitalism at its finest" and how, pray-tell, am I supposed to stop 'using' it?

Per-text messaging rates exist to punish those who send or receive the occasional message. It has nothing to do with the big "problem" the telecom companies are talking about - the power text users who're "clogging" the network with their flurry of messages. Those, you see, are on low-priced fixed-rate unlimited message plans so they remain unaffected.

It's simple math. At $0.10 apiece, unless and until I start sending/receiving more than 50 messages consistently each and every month it's not worthwhile for me to sign up for a plan - even though it's a mere $5.00 per month. However any time I talk to a rep from my phone company they tell me my option is to do just that.

That's the problem right there. In the US, the person *receiving* the message pays for part of it. In sensible countries (like Australia), the person *sending* the message bears the full cost - there is zero charge to receive a message.

AC sucketh at logic. Every day thousands die in Africa from malnutrition, so should solving the problem of poverty in the US be abandoned?

The cost of text messaging is vastly disproportionate to the actual data transfer that takes place. VASTLY. If you paid the same amount for data transfer on your internet connection you would be shitting blood and blowing steam out of your ears instead of saying "Who cares.[sic]".

Solving the problem of over-priced text-messaging is as simple as changing a variable or a few in the billing systems of the main carriers, no doubt.
Even during an economic downturn, there are people who text-message. Lowering the cost of that text-messaging means they have more money to put into buying clothes or butter or cars or computer games or any actual goods that drive the economy rather than spending arbitrarily inflated amounts to the major mobile carriers.
Repeat after me: "THIS IS NOT A ZERO-SUM GAME!". Just because one Senator writes a letter on the subject of cell-phone company gouging, doesn't mean he can't also fight on any of those issues that you deem more important. It also doesn't mean that other Senators can't fight for those other issues. Or are you implying that all Senators are in collusion and fighting only for lower text-messaging costs?

No wonder America is eating itself if they allow people like the parent to vote...

"Or are you implying that all Senators are in collusion and fighting only for lower text-messaging costs?"

No. They are all going after populist minor problems that everyone can agree on, but aren't major issues. Most of the time, the problems they examine aren't solvable by congress directly anyway and its a huge waste of time. Congress has examined Exxon multiple times, but usually only in an election year. They are letting the real problems slide in order to get re-elected more easily. The entire process has become circular. "If I vote for this my critics will tear me apart and I won't be re-elected to solve problems in the future". Sound familiar?

In CDMA, the broadcast from one base-station is divided into many channels... 1 pilot, 1 sync, 1-8 paging, and up to 61 traffic channels (per frequency channel). Ignoring the pilot and sync, which allow the cell phones to find and synchronize the the system, we have paging channels where the phones watch for messages from the base station letting them know what channel to go to for an incoming call, and traffic channels for those calls.

Into this system, text messaging was bolted on as an afterthought. These are short messages, so they get sent out on the paging channel, since it isn't worth the time and effort to set up a traffic channel, only to tear it down again 80ms later, after the message has been transmitted.

Then came unlimited text messaging plans, and teenagers. "Hi sue! How R U?" [send] "Gr8! Saw Bob at park." [send] "Really? What was he wearing?" [send] "The shirt you bought him!" [send] "Awesome!" [send]. All of a sudden, relatively speaking, the text messaging system volume overloaded the paging channel's regular traffic. Network areas which only ran a single paging channel, suddenly needed to assign more channels to paging. Ok, not a problem, the standard allowed for up to 8. But in areas where a lot of phones were in use already had multiple paging channels. These find themselves in running out of paging channel bandwidth, while large swaths of traffic channels are not in use.

The problem isn't that text isn't cheap to send. It is the standard and the system were developed for voice traffic, and a tiny fraction was reserved for short data messages. The use case of teenagers with unlimited text messaging wasn't considered. To change the standard, and the systems which employ the standard - such as to add more paging channels - will require new phones and/or software upgrades to all existing phones out there, or they'll suddenly not work. It isn't just a matter of upgrading software in the network base-stations.

will require new phones and/or software upgrades to all existing phones out there

Why not just roll it out in stages like any other protocol update? Build a specification that uses the EV-DO part of the network for SMS and have all new phones receive/send SMS that way by default.

The old system could be left in place indefinitely (AMPS was a dinosaur and still supported up until Feb 2008) and would receive less and less traffic as all those teenagers upgraded their phones. Hell, I doubt it would take that much time. The phone that Mom and Dad bought them three months ago is so YESTERDAY.

In this case, the SYNC channel message tells the phone how many paging channels there are, and only has 3 bits for this information. And the sync channel message doesn't have any versioning information, so they can't add another bit without breaking all existing phones.

Even with EV-DO (data optimized), text messaging still has a fundamental problem: it is short. If a traffic channel is brought up to send the message, the base station has to tell the access terminal (cell phone, but we're talking EV-DO here) to go to listen on the particular channel, the AT has to send back a report on how fast it can receive data (based on SNR), before the base station can send the message. This all takes time - unnecessary overhead. But to send the text message on the paging channel means (in the case of EV-DO) sending it at the slowest possible data rate, since it doesn't know the SNR of the AT and thus the speed it can receive the transmission at. It has to default to the lowest possible speed.

EV-DO is great at sending large swaths of data at high rates. For short message services, it suffers the same overhead inefficiencies CDMA does.

In this case, the SYNC channel message tells the phone how many paging channels there are, and only has 3 bits for this information. And the sync channel message doesn't have any versioning information, so they can't add another bit without breaking all existing phones.

Why would you have to touch the existing protocol? When a phone running the new software comes onto the network it communicates back to home base this status and home base knows to route SMS via the new path instead of the old paging method. The old paging method sticks around for phones running the older software and for normal voice services.

EV-DO is great at sending large swaths of data at high rates. For short message services, it suffers the same overhead inefficiencies CDMA does.

Alright. So how about some other method? Take one of those traffic channels and dedicate it to SMS. Each phone gets a time slot to listen for incoming SMS. That wouldn't address the mobiles sending texts (how does that work exactly? Do they have to get on a traffic channel to upload one?) but it would seem to be a start. I would presume that this could be rolled out without breaking old phones -- the new ones would just communicate their capability when connecting to the network and not receive incoming SMS on the paging channel.

Point being that there has to be some way they could fix this is if it was really a serious problem for them. If it was why offer unlimited SMS plans? I don't buy it as an explanation for a $0.20 SMS fee.

The theory that I've heard that makes the most sense is that one of the key indicators in the mobile industry is ARPU (average revenue per user). If you sell your customers text plans you bring up your ARPU. By making individual messages more and more expensive they convince more people to buy text plans. Or fork over $2-$3 for a handful of Google searches or "pick up some milk" type usage. Either way they win.

For sending SMS messages, on the reverse link (mobile to network), there are accesses channels which correspond to the 1-8 paging channels. A mobile will start broadcasting its request periodically, a little stronger each time, until the network acknowledges the access attempt.

Currently, a traffic channel is encoded with a long-code specific to the individual cell phone assigned to the traffic channel. No problem, we can encode it with a general-purpose long code, known to all cell phones - this is just s

Oh, they're definitely the ones causing the crisis, with unlimited text packages. Presumably, they'll do the switch part of bait-n-switch at some point (unlimited becomes say 50 msgs/day). Voice traffic will always have priority over text messaging, since they can delay that as much as needed, as long as the average text arrival rate is less than the average service rate, and their queues are deep enough to handle bursts.

I'll concede that the SMS system isn't at the breaking point yet, so the networks are

It's because the government is granting them use of scarce public resources (bandwidth, rights of way for towers and wires). Because AT&T gets use of a piece of spectrum, nobody else can and thus can't compete.

Plus there is the oversight functions of government designed to prevent competitors from collaborating to raise prices.